Feminist Institutionalist Research Articles

‘Velvet Triangles’ in Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Indonesia

Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS Agenda) has been recognized as a landmark in the history of global efforts to maintain international peace and security by centering women on the agenda. Indonesia has shown its commitment to WPS Agenda by adopting its first National Action Plan (NAP) in 2014. On top of that, Indonesia is also committed to increasing the number of female peacekeepers in the UN peacekeeping missions. This research aims to examine how WPS Agenda as a global normative framework diffuses and is internalized in Indonesia. This research employed a feminist institutionalist approach and a qualitative method. Using the concept of ‘velvet triangles’ by Alison Woodward (2004) as our theoretical framework, we argue that the triangular network of velvet actors—consisting of feminist bureaucrats, civil society organizations’ activists, and gender experts—plays a critical role in making a considerably important space for the diffusion of WPS Agenda within Indonesia’s domestic politics and foreign policy debates. In concluding the article, we propose two considerations taking into account the formal and informal arrangement of the velvet constellation and the transnational scale of the network’s actors to provide a more nuanced conceptual definition of velvet triangles.

Gender at the crossroads: the role of gender in the UN’s global counterterrorism reform at the humanitarian-development-peace nexus

ABSTRACT Since the early 2000s, the United Nations (UN) global counterterrorism architecture has seen significant changes towards increased multilateralism, a focus on prevention, and inter-institutional coordination across the UN’s three pillars of work. Throughout this reform process, gender aspects have increasingly become presented as a “cross-cutting” theme. In this article, I investigate the role of gender in the UN’s counterterrorism reform process at the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, or “triple nexus”, from a feminist institutionalist perspective. I conduct a feminist discourse analysis of the counterterrorism discourses of three UN entities, which represent the different UN pillars of peace and security (DPO), development (UNDP), and humanitarianism and human rights (OHCHR). The article examines the role of gender in the inter-institutional reform process by focusing on the changes, overlaps and differences in the discursive production of gender in the entities’ counterterrorism agendas over time and in two recent UN counterterrorism conferences. I find that gendered dynamics of nested newness and institutional layering have played an essential role both as a justification for the involvement of individual entities in counterterrorism and as a vehicle for inter-institutional cooperation and struggle for discursive power.

Negotiating Political Power at ‘Critical Junctures’: Women and Constitution Drafting in South Africa and India

From a feminist institutionalist perspective, this article engages in a comparative analysis of South Africa, one of the only post-transition democracies where women organized as a distinct interest group representing gender interests were able to negotiate and gain access to political power, and India, where women’s participation was predominantly as ‘nationalist women’. It argues that constitution drafting is a decisive critical juncture when descriptive representation can be translated very effectively into the substantive representation of women as equal citizens, provided women qua women and as gender-conscious agents are able to intervene to promote the cause of their effective political participation.

Developing a theoretical framework for exploring the institutional responses to the Athena SWAN Charter in higher education institutions—A feminist institutionalist perspective

Why does the institutional response of higher education institutions to a ‘potentially institutionally transformative’ gender equality programme such as the Athena SWAN (AS) Charter matter? If a higher education institution seeks and attains the AS award, then the institutional response would be to embed the Charter’s action plans thoroughly without resistance or variation across higher education institutional contexts? These are the initial and broader reflective questions underpinning and inspiring this article. The reality is that the Athena SWAN Charter actions and commitments are not simply installed into the technical rules and procedures of higher education institutions, resulting in the organisational and cultural change it seeks. It is argued in this article that applying a feminist institutionalist lens, which deals with the exchange between formal and informal rules, norms and practices, and the roles played by actors working with the rules – the micro-foundations of gendered institutions – will inform our understanding of how a change programme such as Athena SWAN can instil institutional change- if any change. This article details a theoretical framework, drawing from the FI perspective, which will be applied to an empirical study exploring the institutional responses of higher education institutions to the Athena SWAN process in Ireland.

Access to justice and institutional regendering: The case of the National Prosecution Bureau of Chile

In 2017, the National Prosecution Bureau of Chile created the Special Unit for Human Rights, Gender-Based Violence, and Sex Crimes, becoming a milestone for criminal prosecution policies as the first time a state institution in Chile used the term ‘gender-based violence’ explicitly in its title. There was no law in the country that addressed and sanctioned this behaviour—recognising it as a social phenomenon—at the time of the Unit's creation. What does the creation of this new Unit mean for access to justice from a gender perspective? To answer this question, we have critically analysed the creation of this Unit as a case study from a feminist institutionalist standpoint. We found that this institutional change might bring a broadening in access to justice for women, girls and LGBTQI+ persons by implementing a gender perspective.

Parliamentary ethnography and feminist institutionalism: gendering institutions – but how?

Gender and politics scholars are conceptualising parliaments as workplaces, drawing on feminist institutionalist frameworks. Ethnography is a promising methodology that can be used to capture how gender is repeated over time. Ethnography offers scholars opportunities to explore heterogeneity by analysing actors as multiply positioned – with and through institutional rules – and affords attention to ambiguity and contradictions by examining everyday ambivalences. Furthermore, it can nuance conceptions of agency, treating agency as in process rather than as static. Despite these potentials, this article finds that the pairing between ethnography and institutionalism has been problematised and considers these concerns in depth. The diversity of feminist institutionalism across epistemological leanings makes for an important reflexive exercise about what ethnography can offer and how it can be practised. More specifically, the article argues that feminist institutionalism can be thickened with ethnography and by drawing on Butler’s concepts of interpellations, undoing and iterability.

Institutional Change in Constrained Circumstances: Gender, Resistance, and Critical Actors in the Chilean Executive

ABSTRACTBecause gender equality actors rarely have sufficient power to create new institutions, this article asks how they can achieve positive gender change in constrained circumstances when the creation of new rules is not possible. Building on a feminist institutionalist approach to analyzing gendered institutional dynamics, power, and resistance, we open the “black box” of one executive: Michelle Bachelet’s first presidency in Chile (2006–10). Using theory-guided process tracing and primarily qualitative data, we examine key reforms in three policy areas—health, pensions, and childcare—that were central to Bachelet’s first program. By analyzing how efforts to incorporate positive gender change fared differently in each area, this study shows how far utilizing, subverting, or converting existing rules—more “hidden” forms of change, often away from legislatures—can be effective, if limited, strategies when gender equality advocates face resistance.

Gender, Power and Privilege in the Parliamentary Workplace

AbstractThis introduction to the Special Section ‘Parliaments as workplaces: gendered approaches to the study of legislatures’ makes the case for revisiting the conditions under which male and female Members of Parliament (MPs) and staff carry out their parliamentary duties, thereby furthering the understanding of parliaments’ inner workings. It shows that adopting a workplace perspective grounded on feminist institutionalist analyses and gender organisational studies opens up new avenues for studying parliaments and the outcomes of political representation. The article then outlines how contributors to this Special Section deal with various aspects of the parliamentary workplace and concludes by highlighting the wider implications of this perspective for examining crucial questions of the parliamentary studies research agenda.

The Parliament as a Gendered Workplace: How to Research Legislators’ (UN)Equal Opportunities to Represent

Abstract In this article, we introduce a Gendered Workplace Approach for studying the gendered nature of parliaments. This approach, which is informed by a feminist institutionalist perspective, addresses the potentially gendered character of both formal and informal institutions that regulate the inner workings of parliament, taking into consideration the obstacles and opportunities facing MPs of different genders. From a gender perspective, our framework focuses on five dimensions of paramount importance for MPs’ working conditions. These are (i) the organisation of work, (ii) tasks and assignments, (iii) leadership, (iv) infrastructure and (v) interaction between MPs.

“This agenda will never be politically popular”: Central Europe’s anti-gender mobilization and the Czech Women, Peace and Security agenda

ABSTRACT The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has recently started to gain traction in Central Europe, notwithstanding discussion in the region about the harms that the so-called “gender ideology” allegedly causes. In 2017, the Czech Republic was the first Central European country to adopt its National Action Plan (NAP) on WPS. Through analyzing the Czech NAP, we explore what kinds of WPS policies can emerge in a seemingly hostile institutional environment, where the pursuit of gender equality is frequently ridiculed and the WPS agenda itself is nicknamed “wine, women, and song.” By combining a feminist institutionalist approach with feminist discourse analysis, we uncover the interplay of formal and informal institutional practices and anti-“gender ideology” discourses during the creation, adoption, implementation, and review of the Czech NAP. We show that, due in part to this glocalized backlash against “gender ideology,” the Czech NAP has been driven from the top down by a small group of femocrats who tend to focus on “small victories” and are careful not to draw too much attention to gender-related agendas. The resulting NAP, however, becomes a declaratory instrument grounded in gender essentialism, a narrative of victimhood, and conventional assumptions about women’s roles in peace and security.

Towards Equal Rights in the Global Game? FIFA Strategy for Women’s Football as a Tightly Bounded Institutional Innovation

FIFA’s recent (rhetorical) embrace of human rights prominently includes commitments to address gender discrimination and promote gender equality both on and off the pitch. What promise does FIFA’s ‘first-ever global strategy for women’s football’ hold as a means of fulfilling such commitments? A feminist institutionalist approach to this question offers insights into the bounded model of change endorsed by the Women’s Football Strategy. It reveals that the Strategy’s three key objectives serve as ‘common carriers’ for both long-standing institutional interests (in power, profit, and prestige) and newer institutional interests (in women footballers, women’s football, and women in football governance). The assumption that these two sets of interests are mutually reinforcing is brought into question by exposing the ways in which FIFA’s mainline institutional priorities, combined with certain structural features of football governance, blunt the reformist potential of the Women’s Football Strategy. Bounded by old institutional features, the Strategy reflects a partial and incremental, rather than comprehensive and revolutionary, approach to addressing gender discrimination. FIFA’s commitment to human rights therefore remains unfulfilled vis-à-vis women in football.

Early Career Researchers’ Experiences of Post-Maternity and Parental Leave Provision in UK Politics and International Studies Departments: A Heads of Department and Early Career Researcher Survey

Supporting increasing equality and diversity in the recruitment and retention of Early Career Researchers from the widest pool of talent available is high on the agenda of universities and policy makers. Notwithstanding this, the demanding nature of academic careers has a disproportionate effect on Early Career Researchers, who may face indirect obstacles in their career development particularly following a period of maternity or parental leave. Our research seeks to expose the nexus of challenges, from job insecurity to the pressures of raising new families that Early Career Researchers face during this critical juncture in their career trajectory. Focusing on Politics and International Studies Departments in the United Kingdom, we document the institutional mechanisms that exist to support Early Career Researchers returning from maternity and parental leave through a Heads of Department and an Early Career Researcher survey to gain an understanding of needs and the impact of institutional measures. Adopting a feminist institutionalist analysis, we map gendered outcomes in the university, through formal and informal rules, which mitigate against those Early Career Researchers taking maternity and parental leave. We end by identifying specific measures which would help to ensure that the university is more supportive of Early Career Researchers taking maternity and parental leave.

Analysing gender and institutional change in academia: evaluating the utility of feminist institutionalist approaches

ABSTRACT This article explores research on gender and institutions for the purposes of informing analytical frameworks for research on institutional change with regard to gender equality in higher education. Drawing on feminist institutionalist studies that explore the relationship between gender, institutions and institutional continuity and change, the aim is to evaluate how this body of scholarship can be adapted to an analysis of the dynamics of gender equality plan implementation in universities.S

Budget Support Through a Gender Lens: The Case of EU Development Cooperation with Botswana

How does the European Union (EU) include gender equality within its budget support? This article examines budget support as an aid instrument through a gender lens by taking on the case of EU development cooperation with Botswana. The aim is to demonstrate how budget support plays out in practice and to analyse its consequences for the EU’s global commitments on gender equality. I assess budget support with a feminist institutionalist approach combining an analysis of process and content. The article concludes that the EU cannot achieve a genuine accountability to women in the practice of its budget support resulting in a limited female ownership. While the EU aims to be a forerunner in the promotion of gender equality, this is not matched by the EU’s external services on the ground which tend to be gender-blind. In the context of a masculine state apparatus, the use of budget support becomes problematic as the voices of women and their movements are being structurally marginalised.

Doing Politics Differently? Applying a Feminist Institutionalist Lens to the U.K. Women's Equality Party

AbstractThe U.K. Women's Equality Party (WEP) was established in 2015 to “bring about change by winning—support, votes and seats.” It has thus far recruited tens of thousands of members and run candidates in European, national, devolved, and local elections. This article provides one of the first empirical analyses of this new actor in U.K. politics. Adopting a feminist institutionalist lens, we examine the extent to which WEP “does things differently” by looking at its discourse, formal party rules, and informal ways of doing things “on the ground.” Drawing on a set of semistructured interviews, observations of local and national party meetings, and document analysis, we argue that while WEP has to some extent tried to set up alternative participatory structures and new “ways of working,” it has also at times fallen back on more traditional, centralized, and hierarchical modes of party organizing, as well as informal practices that are more typically associated with male-dominated parties.

Fish Fingers and Measles? Assessing Complex Gender Equality in the Scenarios for the Future of Europe

AbstractIn 2017, at a time when the EU was experiencing a triple crisis, the European Commission published a White Paper containing five scenarios outlining potential ways out of it. In his State of the Union address Commission President Juncker added a sixth. Although the Commission refers to fundamental values it neglects gender equality and reduces equality to the harmonization of the quantity of fish in fish fingers and EU‐wide access to vaccination against measles. Despite the neglect of gender equality, the scenarios are not gender neutral. A feminist institutionalist analysis unpacks the potential direct and indirect positive and negative gendered consequences of each scenario and illuminates how the choice of scenario makes a difference as to their gendered impacts and as to the access for feminist actors to bring gender issues to the table.

Lost in the Process? The impact of devolution on abortion law in the United Kingdom

Using the case study of abortion policy across the United Kingdom, this article takes a feminist institutionalist approach to advance our understanding of state architecture and party competition within decentralised political systems. Despite increasing divergences across the United Kingdom in relation to abortion policy, contemporary debates around abortion access have rarely become politicised. Moreover, as this article demonstrates, when they have, the subject has been framed by politicians as a constitutional matter, relating to legislative competencies, rather than considered in terms of women’s rights. This framing, we argue, is linked to the specific constitutional arrangements of the post-devolution UK and the political strategies of the parties operating within them. Drawing upon parliamentary debates and interviews with political representatives to map the circumstances driving changes to abortion policy in the United Kingdom, this article introduces important comparative lessons for other cases of political decentralisation on the discussions and policies concerning women’s rights.

It’s gender Jim, but not as we know it … A critical review of constructions of gendered knowledge of the Global South

This article explores how research helps construct a certain type of ‘gender’ knowledge that arises from, informs and reinforces ‘instrumentalist’ gendered policy perspectives on development of the Global South. It uses a case study of research funded under the ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation which awarded 122 grants amounting to £66.2 million (around US$88 million) between 2005 and 2015. From a systematic review of the awards a typology of gender inclusion and exclusion was constructed that found 60% of all awards mentioned gender or included some level of gender analysis. The subsequent synthesis of the evidence suggested that in only 30% of all awards was the gendered knowledge produced central to the study and/or focused on better understanding gender roles, relations and identities. Applying a Feminist Institutionalist lens, the study highlights how institutional ideas around gender are reflected in the funding call specifications, and in turn influence how researchers ‘engendered’ their research, and the type of gendered knowledge produced. It finds much of the new gendered knowledge produced out of the Joint Fund emerged from non-gender focused research often produced by non-gender specialists. It suggests that as gender becomes mainstreamed into research, and as more researchers ‘do gender’, so research may become, conversely, less ‘gendered’. The ‘new’ gender knowledge produced may then merely evidence existing institutional policy positions rather than advance the policy agenda.

Women or Leaders? Practices of Narrating the United Nations as a Gendered Institution

AbstractThe United Nations has been an important forum for promoting women's rights, but women are still underrepresented at the most senior levels of its leadership. This points to persistent obstacles in reaching gender parity at the UN, despite the organization's overt commitment to this objective. Situated in feminist institutionalist insights, I argue that the institutionalization of gender inequality through practices in the UN as a gendered institution can account for continued barriers to women leadership. This makes contributions to feminist institutionalist literature in international relations by taking it to the individual microlevel. Gendered practices sustain, inform, and manifest themselves in four interconnected processes that reinforce gendered divisions of subordination: positional divides, symbols and imagery, everyday interactions, and individual identity (based on Acker 1990, 146–47; Scott 1986). These processes and their practices become accessible through the narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with senior women leaders at the UN. By recognizing their narratives as valid forms of insight into the study of the UN, this approach recognizes women leaders’ agency as opposed to portraying them as numbers only.

Feminist Experiences of ‘Studying Up’: Encounters with International Institutions

This article makes the case for feminist IR to build knowledge of international institutions. It emerges from a roundtable titled ‘Challenges and Opportunities for Feminist IR: Researching Gendered Institutions’ which took place at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Baltimore in 2017. Here, we engage in self-reflexivity, drawing on our conversation to consider what it means for feminist scholars to ‘study up’. We argue that feminist IR conceptions of narratives and the everyday make a valuable contribution to feminist institutionalist understandings of the formal and informal. We also draw attention to the value of postcolonial approaches and multi-site analyses of international institutions for creating a counter-narrative to hegemonic accounts emerging from both the institutions themselves, and scholars studying them without a critical feminist perspective. In so doing, we draw attention to the salience of considering not just what we study as feminist International Relations scholars but how we study it.